coyote savvy or chicken little

There has been a regular spree of concessions and confessions lately coming from the US government and I don't know quite what to make of this surprising bit of frankness.  Via a few bloggers either invited, planted, or embedded as part of a US Treasury Department deep background self-assessment, senior officials basically allow that the subsidies and programs styled mortage relief are in effect only benefiting the banks and prolonging the suffering of homeowners.  Under the terms of the program, for which only a narrow percentage of struggling households in America have managed to qualify and navigate the paperwork, total debt is not reduced, just the terms of the repayment schedule: families already underwater on their mortage--owing more on their home loans than their house is worth, can now pay less per month, letting banksters project more revenue due to interest on principle and thereby lend out more money with their risk of default mitigated by the government program.  Even without the assistance of unextraordinary cynicism, if Treasury officials did admit to this, knowing the information would go public and be left to skewed to fairly sober judgment, that is pretty flooring in itself.

 It is like the latest Wikileaks dispatch that poses the equally unextraordinary question what if America is garnering the reputation as an exporter of terror and general ill-will.  Is the US government more willing to entertain the hypothetical, even unapologetically so?  There is another blatant beast, as reported by Time Magazine, in the headlines concerning a California circuit court ruling that upholds the right of government agents to pop a tracking device on any one's vehicle.  The Constitutional augurers, very non-chalantly, decided that a citizen has no reasonable expectation--or freedom from intrusion, in his driveway.  I am sure that gated-communities within this court's jurisdiction are exempted.

leechcraft

I gave everbody a bit of a scare when I needed to be rushed to the emergency room, with all the signs, I had decided in the car, of a stroke or something else catastrophic.  I was admitted to the hospital and with friends and family, sort of puzzled through what else may have set off this frightening episode.  Going stepwise, it made sense what the less traumatic causes might have been and did wonders to relieve my worries, which I am sure just exaserbated and magnified every misplaced sensation.  At first, to me, nothing seemed particularly out of place, but it seemed I had succumbed to a terrible coalition of too much coffee, barometric pressure, aspirin, an empty stomach, laissez-faire tensions at work that conspired with a sinus headache and a panic attack.

 They seem like sensible and common enough experiences--shared to the extent I am sure I was not the first to make that mistake, but I suppose not intelligibly communicable until one experiences it for ones self.  A battery of tests, including an MRI that was a strange and artistic experience, isolated among the sounds of laser blasts and techno whale music, and an ultrasound scan on the veins in my neck eliminated the most dire causes.  The physcian admitted to me that 90% of the time, they never know what causes these things before discharging me the next day.  I just never though a series of mundane irritants could mimic--at least what I imagine it to be--the feeling of something scarier and much worse.  A panic attack, and I hope I am using the proper terminology, is by no means something innocent, and neither are the underlying anxieties and vulnerabilities that invite it in.

mätzchen

Unfortuneately, I think, the German government is buying more and more into gimmickery.  Despite arguments against initiating the program, the counterpart to the US Health and Human Services Secretary, Ursula von der Leyen (Minister of Families, Seniors, Women and Children and interested in other things as well, thank you very much) seems rather hell-bent on launching Germany-wide programs that certain communities have pieced together that would issue a credit-card to children of welfare (Hartz IV) that they can use instead of entry fees for museums, cultural events and sports centers.  Opponents maintain, like H said when it was first introduced, that it will be an affront to many parents, sending the message that they can't be relied on to provide enriching things for their own kids, and there is the prohibitive expense of issuing cards and card-readers to all these venues, especially little museums and sites that only charge nominal fees in the first place.  I imagine that carrying around a poor family's credit card would be a little sygmatizing as well.  I hope von der Leyen has good intentions with this program, but I suspect rather one can just follow the money and find who stands to see a profit off of this rather unnecessary installation.  It reminds me of the full body airport scanners that the EU was pressured into buying or to be later mothballed. 

Further, it is just like with the fancy transaction authorization number (TAN) generator calculators, which are meant to phase out mailing bank customers lists when they ran out of secure numbers.  The calculator works out a supposedly unbreakable random number by reading the magnetic stripe on one's bank cards.  This sounds to me like the algorithm that solves every Sudoku puzzle and takes the fun out of it.  Some banks are forcing this on their clients, but these gadgets were a bit premature, since Germany is now moving, maybe as a result of more outside influences and in response to the wishes of the US to monitor transactions for terrorist activity, to adopt standardized SWIFT banking parameters for their accounts and banking identification numbers (Bankleitzahlen--BLZ).  If the numbers can that drastically, I am sure those calculators will be useless and the banks will be obligated to buy a whole new batch of them.

unterhaltung

The movie industry is being very quick, escalating the technology, expense and application to diverse genres, to embrace three-dimensional technology.  A part of it I guess is supposed to be cutting-edge but 3-D movies already rose and fell out of favour, and I wonder if its not a belated and possibly unwelcome re-packaging and re-introduction, something nostalgic or forgotten and unknown.  I suppose also the entertainment industry leverages more control if its spectacle is relegated again to the theater.  A stage play or a live concert is a nice dose of engaging the audience.  Movies and the whole entertainment industry in general is struggling towards  hyperrealism, blurring the skirm and screen.  I wonder, however, where those fuzzy edges will be in a few years, re-mastering classic films like the colourization fad of the early 90s should the derth of originality continue.  Nonetheless, I can't fathom that 3D enhances the story-telling process, and no story ever told was not because of technical limitations from recited epic poetry to prose to big-budget films.  Entertainment, no matter what form it takes, still relies on the imagination of the spectator, otherwise it's not art or anything more creative than a carnival ride.  3D elements may have its place in reporting, and that may possibly one day help differentiate actual news from entertainment.